He-She: A Character Study
by ModernArt2012
Summary: Neither of them are blushers.


**A/N: I was given the opening line "Neither of them are blushers", and to not use any proper nouns in reference to the characters being written about, but I can use any characters I want. It's also supposed to be longer than 10,000 words. This is what I came up with.**

**Disclaimer: I don't own anything but the ideas that follow the first line. **

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Neither of them are blushers. It's not that they don't feel embarrassed – they do, and everyone who knows them will attest to the fact that they do – they just have a different way of showing it. His is to look off into the distance aloofly, arms crossed. Hers is to close her eyes and ignore the existence in front of her, though they both are taken with blustering and ranting in irritation, generally paired with posturing and threats of violence. Hers comes across as anger; his is generally taken as arrogance. It helps that their natures are geared towards being straightforward and guileless – they are who they are and they are not ashamed or sorry for who they are, nor will they ever be. She is in your face and brash, unapologetic and sincere; he is icy and taciturn and honest and recalcitrant, and both are unrepentant of the fact. The fact that their natures are opposite matches surprises no one, especially since they are friends. It takes one part recognition of their shared traits and one part recognition that they are complete and utter opposites in the way they manifest their traits that formed the bonds of friendship, though neither of them seem to realize it or care to. If they ever did, she would probably laugh and tease him and herself mercilessly, he would probably just take it in stride and file it away for further examination at some later point in time, or maybe harrumph and cross his arms over his chest.

He was always the more unpredictable of the two – she was always the one who rushed headlong into things, always so predictable in her actions that you couldn't say that she was the more unpredictable of the pair because her instincts were to deal with things in the messiest way possible and as quickly as possible. Not that she didn't think, no, they both were their own type of intellectual. Hers was more of a realize things instantly and deal with it immediately; his was genius undoubtedly, but to more taken to ponder and probe and rationalize and then act, which opened a realm of possibilities for what he may do in any given situation. But he was the one to never question orders, she was the questioner and dissenter and the one who inevitably went against the grain to achieve some moral end which would cause the most havoc and most destruction on the grandest scale possible. Neither of them were sorry about that either.

They both feared, but never showed it to the world. He was afraid of big pictures things – the big bad, hurting his loved ones irrevocably, not being strong enough, not being good enough and always having to prove himself. She was afraid of smaller things, comparatively: the monsters roaming around town, afraid for her sister, afraid of never getting her brother back, dying some horrible death without ever seeing any of her loved ones in the afterlife. They never compared fears, since they never acknowledged they feared something. Even if they had, they probably wouldn't comment on the fact that their fears were practically one and the same, components of one another, if they even deigned to acknowledge the point. Which they probably wouldn't. They respected each other enough to never belittle each other's weakness, secretly knowing that their weaknesses were another tie that bound them together.

She was the only one who could ever shake him back to reality. When he visited, it was generally his time to get away from the issues plaguing him _back there_. He was unrepentant about the fact that he used her as an escape. She knew, and used him to keep tabs on her brother, keep him safe in her own manner, which he knew as well. They never hid the fact they were in a mutual state of 'use', but that didn't bother them anyways. But when he did forget to leave the baggage at the gate, she was the one who would find the bright side and make him forget, if just for a little while. Or punch him and tell him to quit whining, then sit down and hear him out, providing an ear and the calm of simply being there. No one ever expected him to take that sort of thing, or to have that sort of relationship with someone, but everyone agreed in hindsight it would always be her because she was the only person they could think of that could get away with it.

They have no pretensions, especially with each other. He doesn't pretend to be a captain and immensely powerful and disdainful of most everything that crosses his path. She doesn't have to pretend to not be worried, or about having to be girly, or about being afraid to point out that he's still disdainful of pretty much everything and he acts likes an old man too. He doesn't pretend that these things don't faze him; she doesn't pretend that she doesn't know he's a captain for all that he looks to be in middle school, and doesn't pretend to treat him with any respect associated with that sort of rank. She doesn't pretend that she knows everything about him, and he doesn't pretend to want to share everything about himself. He doesn't pretend that she doesn't know why he comes; she doesn't pretend that she won't push him off the window ledge if he shows up at some Gods forsaken hour of the morning. He doesn't pretend that he doesn't worry about certain things that he shouldn't; she doesn't pretend that she doesn't care. He doesn't pretend that her Hollow sensing reactions are better than his soul pager's; she doesn't pretend that she doesn't go monster hunting. He doesn't bother to hide his ire at that; she doesn't pretend that she's going to take his advice. He doesn't pretend that he doesn't like the soccer ball she gifted him for his death day, she doesn't pretend that she's not a little fascinated that he remembers the date he died.

He can read between her lines. She can read between his. He knows her tells, the infinitesimal narrowing of her eyes that broadcasts her distaste or displeasure and generally means someone's going to be hurt physically within the next 30 seconds. He also knows when she's sincerely pissed because she'll press her lips together into a thin slash across her face and then he knows to try and make sure she doesn't kill someone, either on purpose or inadvertently. She knows that when he gets unnecessarily mad, especially at certain people, it's only because he cares. He knows that when she doesn't pretend not to care what he says, it really means that she heard him, but she's not going to do anything different, she knows that his annoyance is his way of saying _"Please be careful."_. She knows the tiny twitch of his hand that belies his almost instinctive reach for his zanpakto, and knows that it's time to diffuse whatever situation or go heading for cover, whichever seems more doable in the next minute or so. His tell for admiration is a grudging harrumph and change of subject, or more telling is a mirthless jibe at something related to the topic, which is harder to distinguish from his usual dry humor, but she knows and doesn't ever explain beyond the basics. She knows that when he trails off or is particularly ambiguous, then he's hiding something major, and it's about time to beat it out of him before it rears its ugly head to bite them in the nether regions at some later-date-that's-closer-than-expected. She's the only person in the known realms of existence that can tell his mood by the type of silence he's got going on, without looking. He knows that when her shoulders loosen unexpectedly, she's about to punch him, and that he probably deserves it. He knows that when she says to ignore something, that she really doesn't want to talk about it right now and to please leave it alone. His version of "_I'm sorry,"_ tended to be aloofly looking into the distance, because he hated being wrong enough to apologize, which embarrasses him because he is a genius and a captain and he shouldn't have to recognize that he is wrong and needs to apologize, but he does anyways and gods above know why he does . Her version of "_I'm sorry_," was a rabbit punch to the shoulder. Their mutual version of "_It's okay,"_ was to rabidly avoid the subject in question for at least two visits.

They never hide who they are. He never hides the fact that he's stabbed a friend, someone who is very important to him in multiple ways. She doesn't hide that she's not completely surprised when he visits because he's forever forgetting that she can feel him from a mile away before he puts on his gigai, and it's pretty darn hard to breathe at times. She also doesn't hide that she's a tomboy, and she absolutely refuses to act girly – her twin has that covered and she's not going to go over the same thing twice when it's already be covered by someone with whom she shares most of her genetic makeup. He doesn't hide that he admires her tenacity, even though it grates on his nerves more often than not. She's never tried to purposefully cover something up, and it's a mutual understanding that they won't do so with each other, because at the end of the day it doesn't really matter, since it'll be a (hopefully) long time before she ever meets anyone he mentions and he's never going to really know any of the people she talks about, so it does no one any good to hide anything. She doesn't hide that she's a take-no-prisoners, go-in-guns-blazing, fire-at-will kind of girl, and he's always openly admired that, well, open in his own way. She respects that he's got keeping calm down to a science, because that's something she'll never be able to do and doesn't think to mask that fact, though she also knows his buttons and when to press them and when not to press them. He knows her buttons, and they privately acknowledge that their buttons, though few and far between, are pretty darn stupid on in the big picture of things. They mutually respect each other's self-awareness, because otherwise they'd be awfully busy trying to hide every other thing from one other, but it's because they're comfortable in their own skins and of whom they are that they are friends and they are able to keep up their friendship.

She pokes fun at him, and gets away with it. She is the only person in known history to have made him laugh, really laugh, in a long time. He privately likes to think it's her infectious smile, because it warms the numb bits of his soul to bearably cold instead of just numb. He takes it as granted that she's the only one who's gotten away with calling him by any sort of nickname, though he defends that it was an accident and she only got away with it because he was busy working and he hadn't noticed her use of a nickname, and honestly they aren't that familiar so you shouldn't read into it all that much. She prefers to punch him in the shoulder and familiarly use his first name as often as possible, because that's how brash she is and she knows she can get away with it. He likes to glare at her when that happens, because that's all he can really do this late in the game since it's far too late to break her of the habit since he didn't start at the beginning. In return, he's the only boy known to get away with sleeping over, which she makes fun of him for too. He knows he's never going to live any of it down, so he goes along with it because it's convenient and easier than being subjugated to weird cooking and possibly infectious craziness, and if that's the price he's got to pay, then he'll live/die. It helps that she smiles broadly through the whole thing, so it's generally overlooked. Also, she's the only person he knows to have figured out how to draw on a bald guy's head without him noticing. He had to hide his snickering all day.

They are more prone to want to end each other before breakfast than anything else, mostly because neither of them are morning people. But that is not to say he is a night person like she is, she prefers the night for reasons she'll never tell, and he never cares enough to ask. He's not a morning person out of centuries of habit – finding your subordinate in some stage of alcohol induced something or other nearly every morning makes for mornings to be pretty terrible in anyone's book. Still, he knows better than to interrupt her nights, getting forcibly pushed off a window ledge is not fun, because the ground is always the same consistency, no matter what the time of day or night. She knows better to interrupt his sleep, but will do it anyways to interject a little spontaneity into his life/death/existence. He wants to end her most then, but is mindful of the paperwork involved and simply decides it's not worth the trouble. She knows it's saved her skin more than a few times, and takes advantage of it every chance she gets. He also knows better than to interrupt her mornings because that's just suicide, and he's died once thank you very much, he'd rather not again. They're both back to some approximation of their normal after breakfast.

He is purple, she says. She is red-orange, he says. She says such a color doesn't exist. He says it's better than blush pink. She says he's purple and he's got to live with it, because he is certainly not blue-green or teal or whatever color he claims his eyes are because that just stupid. He tells her that her eyes are silver, but that doesn't mean he automatically associates her with silver or grey, because that would be stupid, because she isn't grey, she's too vibrantly alive to be grey. He however is blue-green like his eyes, because he is icy and unusual and a complete enigma. That was the first time he fell off her roof, and not the last.

They have inside jokes. All she has to do is say "soccer ball" and he pales. His favorite is to raise an eyebrow and say "blush pink," and her eyes widen almost comically, and then there is bound to be an undecipherable argument that no one will understand except them and possibly the crazy healer girl, but she's a little loony anyways, so no one really counts her. A mutually favored joke is to hum the theme to some long defunct cartoon that no one can remember the name to yet they'll have the theme stuck in their head all day, that has the both of them in their personal versions of a giggle fit. "Pudding" is used rarely, but gets the job done in record time. The most inexplicable is the reference "tattoo" because it's the one that has him leaving after a few minutes to laugh in private and her stuffing a fist in her face to keep from laughing herself unconscious.

She is the one people deem to be more approachable. He's too cool and stand-offish and has this aura of being menacing and above them all. He likes to laugh internally at this, because she hates meeting new people – that's always been her twin's job, and she's never had to really pay much attention to social conventions. But she'll play nice for a few minutes until she either decides that she likes you or hates your guts, in which case she'll either tell you straightforwardly or simply forget your existence for the rest of eternity. He wholeheartedly disapproves – he's the one everyone in his division comes to for help, advice, or even a moment of peace. If it's in private, then it's okay, because then he can be helpful and a leader at the same time without seeming like he's playing favorites. It's the not-so-secret secret of the division, and he knows his lieutenant tells all the recruits because they need the most help and he's just the person to do it. He's also the one who remembers every division member's name, past and present, as well as birthdays/death days, which is why his division is said to be the happiest because he makes sure to schedule that every member gets their birthday/death day off as well as a small monetary gift in their next paycheck from his account.

They are completely independent beings. He's not in any way dependent on her nor she is on him. They get along, but it's not some driving need to be together all the time or to relate everything that ever happens to them to the other. They aren't a plural, they are him and her and are completely separate beings. They don't seem to get why everyone else seems to think that what they tell one of them will get back to the other and just automatically assume that in order to get news to the other, that they should tell one half of a whole. It just doesn't work like that. They don't discuss serious things with each other, they are havens and friends and don't bother to remember trivial things when there are better things to be done. In their not so humble opinions, if it's not important enough to tell that person face-to-face, then it's not important enough to bother to relay. But some things happen to be important enough, so on rare occasions she'll remember that so and so of their mutual acquaintance has challenged him to a one-on-one soccer game or to a game of shogi or to a watermelon eating contest. That's not to say that they aren't reliable, they're the most reliable people if you ask everyone they know. She relies on him to be himself and not the opposite of whatever state he happens to be in, and he relies on her to be herself and alive because that is their unspoken understanding and their reliance on each other is that they are friends who lean on each other to pretend like everything is perfectly normal. They are their own normal, and no one seems to get that.

He is the only person to see her hurts, physical and otherwise. She's always known his, she's simply better at hiding hers. They're the only ones who have seen each other cry, however. They'll both indignantly point out that it was raining and it was the rain that they saw, not tears. By unspoken agreement, they never speak about any of it, and studiously avoid their trigger subjects. If someone else does, they pretend that person hasn't spoken. But if they have to speak about it, if they ever do, which they don't, they are roundabout and ambiguous and then only the other knows what they're talking about and only that other person is allowed to comfort. Because as rough and tumble and reckless as she is and as cold and refined and distant as he is, they both have it in them to comfort, if only for a little while and only to their closest loved ones.

They were always told by everyone that they were a study in light and dark. She petulantly pointed out if they wanted a study in light and dark they could have stolen Sode no Shirayuki and Zangetsu and compared Shirayuki in shikai and Zangetsu in bankai. He glared at them and raised a fine eyebrow, and told them to leave him alone, he had paperwork to complete. Someone once tried the yin-yang analogy, but all it got them was an odd look from him and from her a question about if they were getting a tattoo of the yin-yang symbol – completely misunderstood intentions. For supposedly intelligent people, everyone had to wonder about how dense they both could be. Someone must have explained what that person meant, because neither of them have been able to face that person to date. It never helped that they had a rational discussion about why such an analogy was completely incorrect in terms of themselves and, actually, it's pretty funny how messed up they got that, wanna get it immortalized on skin? Pretty much everyone has some form of a guess as to whether or not they actually had it done, and to what extent. They'll never tell.

She's the one who finds the bright side. He's the one who faces reality. It's not that she's incapable of facing the bleakness of a situation, no, she recognizes it and faces it and then goes on to find the good that comes from the situation. And it's not that he wallows in the negative, he simply weighs all the facts equally and doesn't take a side. It would be simpler to say that he is impartial, but that's not true, he has hopes and beliefs and wants things from the future, but he has accepted the fact that they may not necessarily happen and that there may be things that come up to hinder his achieving those things. She generally punches him when he gets like that, then grins and points out the good things that are going to happen because she believes that they will happen. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't, and most of the time he can't help but be in awe of her unshakable faith in tomorrow.

They are prone to labeling themselves, and each other. It's not that they themselves mind, it's everyone else. They say they're friends, the world tut-tuts back something about lying to themselves. He calls himself the cold one, and the world tries to reassure him he's not, much to her amusement. She tells people she's brash, and they try and assure her she's not, much to his derision. Their favorite label, however, has to be for everyone not them, and they happen to agree "delusional" is the best way to put it. It helps that neither of them are into sparing feelings, especially of one another. It's the only way their system works and they like their system.

He isn't defined by his captain's haori. He hates that that's the first thing most people see about him, and keeps up a charade of trying to pretend it defines him. She sees past that, somehow the only person who has been able to in a very long time. True, he wants the respect afforded to a captain when he is working, but outside the office? He wants to remember what it was like to have fun, what it meant to live and be merry with his friends. He has faint memories of times with his pseudo-sister, but his long lifespan has faded them and they're no longer quite so bright and cheerful and he half-way believes that he has simply grown too cynical in the timeframe between then and now. She somehow reaches past all that and brings out the part of him that is (more or less) her age and just is with him, giving him the merriment and friendship that he has subconsciously longed for for a very long time. Not that she can't be mature, because she is, and she matches him pace for pace, stride for stride in everything that matters: where he is mature and calm, she is mature and calm, where she is confident, he is confident, and where he hides his deepest, darkest fears and secrets, so, too, does she. But where he cannot begin to lift the burden of centuries of habit and position and leadership, she finds the strength to lift nearly effortlessly. As his spirit is fond of misquoting human movies, he usually gets, "You don't find a girl like that every century." He blatantly ignores him.

They have some unspoken language that people generally assume means They're Up To No Good. It actually means that She's Up To No Good, and will invariably drag him into it, so really They're Both Up To No Good, But He's Just Been Pulled Into Whatever She Has Planned, And Is In No Way Complicit To Her Actions Nor Does He Condone Them In Any Way. Nobody is arguing the semantics. He never complains because he secretly enjoys the thrill of whatever she's got planned, even if he must, as the years-gone-by-in-their-lifespan-wise older of the two, try and dissuade her from that plan. She knows that after the first ten times or so, he stops trying as hard. As well as she knows him, she chalks up the fact to resignation, not fun, wrongly so, but he'll never tell her otherwise. In either case, on lookers are more than a little scared when they see the conspiring looks, the self-assured smirk and the resigned sigh. He doesn't care that everyone he knows thinks she's Getting Him Up To No Good. People that she knows think that he's Getting Her Up To No Good, and mutual friends think they're all screwed, two of the smartest people they know are officially conspiring to be Getting Up To No Good. Neither of them will ever reveal how he's the one who "accidentally" points out flaws in her plans, and then how to make the plan better, even though almost everyone figures it out. Except the crazy healer chick with fairy-hair clips, but she's explainable.

She makes people have the wrong idea about their relationship. He finds he doesn't really care that much. She's old enough now that guys are starting to take notice, and she knows just how to keep the guys away because she's been told repeatedly that she's got a great body, so she uses him to keep the perverts at bay. Because if they're not afraid of what she'll do to them (generally, having years of soccer to build up one's kicking power makes many guys afraid for their future offspring in relation to the person with the experience), then they better be afraid of what he'll do (because knowing how to use a sword probably ranks higher than knowing how to kick a person's family jewels into their body cavity and sterilizing them for life on the scale of what's scarier). She ranted about it before, while he listened, paying rapt attention though he outwardly looked like he cared less. That was his way, and she knew what he was doing even if everyone else didn't. Somehow everybody had this impression that just because she's a pretty face that she can't take care of herself. People were butting in to "help her out" – aka, get her number – expecting her to fawn all over them in gratitude. This, as he knew it would, pissed her off to no extent and inevitably got the person in question butt handed to them in the most humilifying and painful and public way possible. Yet somehow (she's still ranting, but he knows better than to interrupt her, because that'll get him pushed off the roof again) they're all afraid of him. How did all her hard work at building a reputation go down the drain?! He waits for her to finish, then waits for the punch line because she never rants on the same topic multiple times unless she's already thought of a solution and more than likely the reason, and if she's noticed how they're all afraid of him, then he knows what the next words out of her mouth are going to be, and he doesn't like them one bit. Of course, he goes along with it, because part of him is happy to oblige and glare menacingly at the guys who look twice at her, also because it saves their lives in the long run from her brother and father, though he informs her of his only stipulation when he tells her that she better read them into her scheme because he doesn't what her brother's bankai directed at him, or for her father to start calling him 'second son'. He likes being scary, and happily ignores his spirit correcting him that he likes being scary for her because they're just friends, gods damn it. He also ignores how he likes the way she fits in the space under his arm perfectly.

They both like the same music. Rather she likes punk rock, and that's pretty much all the modern music he's heard, so ipso facto he likes it too. He does like the heavy guitar and bass, the pounding drum that resonated somewhere inside his chest like a second heart, but can't find himself to care all that much about the state of modern society or whatever the singer in those songs sings about. She never verbally expresses what she likes about the genre, but it's basically the sound track to her life. He's not surprised when she has a soundtrack for training, studying, and really just about anything that she can get away with sticking her ear buds in and listening while doing. What he'll never admit to is the fact that he has the lyrics running through his head while he trains, the heavy riffs and winding melodies and the thrumming harmony running on a loop. Which invariably makes him think of her. Which pleases his spirit to no end, and which is why he can never admit the fact to anyone. She'll never tell, but she's got a playlist that's purely him, not that she made it for him, but she made it with him in mind, and that has to count for something even though she'll adamantly refuse to claim that they're anything but friends.

She likes that everyone who meets him thinks that he's cool and cocky and therefore must be No Good At All. He's surprised when she tells him about it, but doesn't seem to want to correct them. That's his nature, to not really care what people he doesn't know or like think about him, after all. She likes the way that he continually surprises everyone when he helps random oba-chans, which pisses him off when she starts snickering after he gets a Pinch On The Cheek, A Handful Of Amanatto, and An Admonition To Quit Bleaching His Hair, He Looks Like A Yakuza Member And He's Really A Nice Boy And Shouldn't Scare People Into Getting The Wrong Idea About His Character (they both agree that it ought to be a Law of Nature at this point, everyone says the same exact thing, she's even managed to memorize the script that all the oba-chan's must know and likes to mouth along with what they're saying so that he has to hide an amused grin.) He likes that he can make her laugh like that, even if it's because yet another oba-chan thinks he's yakuza and that he needs to stop bleaching his hair.

They both agree that he doesn't look good with any hair color other than white. It was originally her brilliant idea, which she adamantly refutes to this day because she holds that the incident was his fault because he let her go through with it in the first place. He retorts that he isn't her keeper, to which she punches him. But she had tried dying her hair brown, which he didn't stop her from trying, which didn't work because she bought the wrong color dye (brown-black instead of brown), and had left it in the bathroom as a failed experiment. He had just come back from getting dirt in his hair (half of each other's fault because she suggested soccer and he fell straight into a mud puddle after being tripped), and was washing his hair and managed to mix up the bottle of hair dye with the shampoo. The resulting mess was hilarious and furtively documented on film by a not-so-mature lieutenant with a tattoo-fetish and really red hair.

They are both one in a million. After all he is a prodigy and she is the by-product of the messiest relationship diagram that might ever exist. That and they are the only ones who could ever deal with one another.

She is not her brother or her twin. She does not fall between the two as far as her personality goes. He is not made or ice, as much as his spirit may lead people to believe. He is flesh and blood and more than likely a little grime, and he is an ice dragon, not just ice. He is fiercely protective of his tre – ahem – his beloveds, and though he may be hard to know or understand, he has a heart and just keeps the people he cares about most to a very select group. Though, come to think of it, they're all female and he probably has a complex somewhere in there. Technically, she's the one to point that last bit out, and he pithily retorts that she has a sibling complex, so she really shouldn't talk. She obdurately holds that she does not have a sibling complex, because she doesn't obsess over her siblings or is too attached and dependent, but he rightly points out that she protects them fiercely, same as him with the people he has a complex. She points out that he probably has a complex about his masculinity due to his height and relative age, and thus only cares about women to try and prove his masculinity. Which is also why he acts like an old geezer. He can't push her off the roof because it'd probably kill her, but he contemplates doing so anyways.

They are both intensely private people. Neither is the most talkative of people unless the situation calls for it, at least among strangers. If they are with close enough friends, they talk as much as the next person. But that doesn't necessarily mean that they let people in. Her twin compares getting her to open up to like pulling teeth or some equally impossible task, and that is her twin whom she adores. The consensus is that they're the only people who they actually let in, and even then, it's only because they are exactly the same and entirely different that they can roam around each other's heads and come out without a single wound. Because they each have their landmines, and sometimes even they can't walk through their minefields without blowing themselves up. Really, they're the only person that could ever be let in to each other's mind, and that worries and amuses them in equal measure.

He is not bothered by the knowledge that she's supposed to hate his guts by the half of her that is her mother's daughter and be his sworn enemy. But he never tells her, nor does he tell her about the fact that she's the product of a mash up between two races that makes her capable of being the scariest combination of everything that has ever supernaturally existed on this planet ever. He also never tells her that she is technically royalty. He's not hiding it, she's just never asked. And it's not his place to tell her. Besides, he doesn't want to consciously admit that it might make him lose her, which would make his spirit right and for all god's sakes they're just friends. She has things she never tells him too, but she's always been better at hiding it.

They have only ever admitted to one another that they are not strong enough. It involved rain and the two of them being alone and possibly the aloud uttering of the words, "My strength … is not enough." And the both of them wept at the knowledge that like all warriors, all fighters, there would be times where they wouldn't be strong enough and everything would come falling down in shards of fragile glass around them and they just wouldn't have the strength to get up again and then they will die a fallen warrior's death – unglamorous and more than likely in a desolate field far from home and hearth and kin with nothing to see but the sky. This is their only frailty, the only moment of weakness that they ever find in one another and share. Because they know what they are not strong enough to be is the ones who don't fight, who don't try, because theirs is a physical strength, not an emotional one. They have minds and bodies geared towards fighting every last step to their graves. No, they don't have the emotional strength to take the brunt of their burdens. Because even they know fighting is simply their denial of the reality in front of them in the hopes that they can change it for the better. They don't have the strength to bow and bend and recoil with the same amount of strength as before – they must be rigid and unyielding like stone or steel because if they bend, they will break and what is broken will never be put back together again into the same state as before, if at all. Physical strength can be increased via training, emotional strength is only something tested in the very forges of hell and only comes out unscathed from the inferno. Those who cannot melt and yield and bounce back like bamboo are the ones who break in trials by fire. They know that is what they are, if they are ever tested like that. They wept for their shared crown of embers, because that would be the death of them. Because they know they cannot bend, and if they cannot bend, they will be broken, and if they break, then everything they stand for will be lost, and then life for them will have no meaning, and they will die. And that is what they mourn.

She's practically memorized his scent. She finds that creepy. She'll also never tell that she enjoys being his fake girlfriend, or how she has a complete playlist dedicated to him (about him? about them?) Because she's not in love with her best friend, since that would be weird and most possibly necrophilia – technically he is dead – and that's just cross all the lines of propriety, which contrary to public opinion she knows and recognizes and follows the ones that make sense. Like the taboo on necrophilia. Because that is the epitome of creepy and she's not going much farther past that line since she's already memorized the way he – a dead guy's spirit –smells. It doesn't bother her as much when he notices that she was wearing perfume once, and then commented that it smelled nothing like her, then helped her buy a new one that was "more her". As her twin so eloquently put it, that must mean he knows what she smells like, too, and it was practically a girlfriend-boyfriend thing to go shopping for a perfume that he liked. It doesn't help that she wears it every day, this light tropical scent that's not sweet but rather earthy and subtle with its smoky floral notes. Still, she grumbles to herself, it doesn't change the fact that it's more than likely necrophilia at this point.

They have a promise, only between one another, that drives them in their own ways. A chant, an oath, the thump of their hearts beating in time with some primal beat that no one else can hear. _Never lost, never far, never alone, never lost, never far, never alone, never lost, never far, never alone… _ No one knows what it means to them, her friends only ever hear it whispered under her breath at soccer practice or when passing by the railing on the hill, his lieutenant only knows of it via the thin engraved strip of metal he tucks behind the pin he always wears. In its own way, it is a promise to watch another sunset together, to keep living and breathing until they can see one another again, to not fall to whatever life throws at them because they always have one another. _Never lost, never far, never alone, never lost, never far, never alone… _At the end of the day, it is what keeps them upright and sane while their world invariably falls apart around them, when their duty and honor and drive to protect has been shaken to the core and they find themselves off balance and in need of support. They are the only ones who can offer that support, to reach across time and dimensions and literally life and death to remind the other that no matter what happens, someone else feels the same, and someone else out there is going to support them pretty much unconditionally.

He's the one who tells her that necrophilia is specifically the love of corpses. Granted, it was in the context of her brother and the short black haired noblewoman who was her brother's partner in action/crime/pretty much everything, after she accuses her brother of necrophilia in one of their conversations. But he is adamant that what he is and what the tiny bunny-obsessed woman are souls, not corpses, so it's really not necrophilia and she should be happy that her brother isn't quite as big of a pervert as she was imagining. Internally, he's glad, because that's simply creepy, and he's highly disturbed by the thought on all grounds, especially in relation to her because he can easily imagine her horror if she discovered a dead guy was in like with her (never in love, too much at stake). Internally, she's secretly pleased but also terrified because she's suddenly without any excuses, and lying to yourself takes a lot when you don't have an excuse. Little does she suspect that her twin has orchestrated the whole event, and is currently taking bets with the various members of the afterlife via the phone.

Neither of them do anything half-***ed. So when they invariably find out about the betting pool, they decide to bet on themselves by adding their names and impossible amounts to her twin's ledger, on equally impossible situations. When the time comes to make all those situations come true, they do so with gleeful abandon on her part and resigned mirth on his part. And they put on the show of their lives, going all out and even ad libbing when it comes down to selling it to the astonished spectators, every last one of them. She's the one who drags him down for a (fake) kiss, perfectly pretending to want him and not afraid to take charge to get what she wants, but he's the one who has hands roaming through her hair and over the gently sloping curves of her body, ready and willing to give her what she's willing to take. No one ever suspects them, which is good, because otherwise everyone would start to wonder how they'd pretended and acted so well without batting an eyelash. It never comes to light that they won their own betting pool, and they're glad because then everyone would want to know whose idea it was, and really, by now everyone ought to know that they'd never tell. No one will ever find out about the way their hearts sped up, and how easy it was to (not) act.

She spends a good ten minutes every time they meet asking after his sword spirit. In turn, said spirit likes to rumble contentedly around his spirit realm, and really, why can't his master just give in and get/take the one person who would think to ask about his sword/spirit/extension of his soul? He pretends that he doesn't understand the dragon's usage of certain words, because the translation of the words used for "to get/ to take" doesn't fully translate to human languages all that well. Then he customarily gets a gentle nudge to the shoulder and asked to please stop day-dreaming. His spirit likes to tell him he's a coward, proceed to tease him how a captain can't even muster up the courage to go on and kiss the girl but can fight monsters, and then laugh his very frozen tail off at his master's expense.

They are never subject-verb agreement. It's the crazy healer-fairy girl who comes up with it, and though no one can explain why exactly it makes sense, yet it does. He and she is, her and him be, he and she goes, running through all the possibilities, they all invariably apply. They is, they goes, they was, they am. There is not a single combination that either of them can come up with to disprove her nugget of insight. It certainly upholds their obdurate claim that they are not a plural, only this makes them a singular, and that scares them most (because the moment someone who is most likely a good candidate for a mental hospital starts making sense is the day one must being to question whether they're crazy or if you're the one who's crazy), because they defy all odds, and if the rules of language themselves no longer apply, then what exactly is destiny trying to tell them? That they are inevitable?

He is ice and she is fire and they come together like two trains bound to collide and there's nothing that can be done to stop it. Neither of them know what the aftermath will be like, the way the spectators watch with eyes wide open and mouths screeching out silent horrified screams. But somehow, it's not trains and raining pieces of burnt flesh and twisted hunks of metal, it's the briefest touch and suddenly they're going off perpendicular to their original route, side by side and leaving astonished figures in their wake. And they don't even know the disaster that is barely averted because they've never been the ones who conjecture. Somehow, they've caught each other as they fall through the burning air and softened each other's landing. Everyone agrees, that in and of itself is a miracle.

They are not cowards, pride themselves on being brave, but they will never admit to their cowardices until it all adds up and nearly becomes too big to be overcome. His cowardice is that he never tells her what's actually on his mind, because for the first time in centuries he doesn't have to be on guard all the time, he doesn't have to be the task master, the mature one, he doesn't have to be anything other than her friend. And for him, he can never tell her that he is only truly free with her. For her, she can never admit that she drops everything when she feels him coming, she'll cancel plans, break curfew, skip practice, she'll skip school as well. And that becomes the wall between them, slowly piling up and rising like the Himalayas surely must have so many thousand years ago. No one knows if they'll ever conquer their Everest, no one knows if they even want to admit that their Everest exists.

She was a force of nature, impossible to contain and a person to be reckoned with. He was cool and calm and collected and a person to be feared in a completely different way than her. Her friends had been afraid of her alone before he ever showed up in her life, but once their fearless leader had an equally scary partner who could advise her and make her listen, well, they decided that they should probably never try and piss one or the other off. Self-preservation instincts and all that. They all fully expect that one day, the pair will rule all of the known universe because they're just so powerful and kick-ass.

They're quick learners. She figures out his little quirks almost immediately. Like he prefers his left foot for fancy maneuvers, on and off the field, but he'll use either with equal skill and at random. He immediately realizes that she likes to dance in the rain, especially the fancy partner ones that her twin watches on television that she pretends are too girly – the one's she can't do with anyone because she has a reputation and no one will join her – so he invites her to dance instead. And they both know that they know the moves from a single watching (in their defense, the younger of the two girls could guilt trip them into just about anything). And they move like two halves of a whole, steady and gliding and grace where she's the one who gives her everything and all in the even the simplest of movements, drawing away and dancing alone for moments on end, always coming back to him because he keeps the pattern and rhythm and he is her rock. She's known it from the get-go, after all.

He maintains that he lets her win arguments. She claims to have lived longer, and technically he can't argue the fact since he is dead and has no way of determining how old he was when he died. She's adamant that since she's older, she's technically his elder and so he has to listen to her. It only works when what she wants to do coincides with what he wants to do, but she generally gets her way anyways because he's her partner in crime and she's the one who comes up with not-so-harebrained schemes and he's just along for the ride and to keep her out of jail and the hospital, if only to keep his reputation for being the "cool, icy captain".

They are constant. He never knows where he stands with her at any given moment – she could be laughing at him one moment, and then he could be receiving a flying karate kick the next, but he can't seem to bring himself to mind. Because he'll always have her back, and she'll always have his and as long as they both know that singular fact, he's okay with being rounded on out of the blue and having to dodge a well-aimed punch. It also kept things exciting, but he chooses to pretend that thought never occurred to him in the first place.

She's not sentimental. Not in the cliché, expected manner. But he can't help but notice that they always meet at the same place – the railing at the top of the hill overlooking most of her hometown. He doesn't know if he ought to read into it or not, but he decides against even thinking about it for much longer because he's the one who's waiting there in the first place, and she's already dragging him off on some new idea and he's officially got better things to do than to worry about sentimentality on either of their parts because they're running from some older/younger kids and he really needs to stop her from getting them into these situations all the time, especially when he's not paying attention. His sword spirit has a point when he asks why he expected anything different from her, and why does he even come when he knows this is a certain occurrence? He decidedly ignores the pointed barb from said sword spirit about sentimentality on his part, mostly because he has better things to do, such as keep running to keep her from outstripping him and leaving him to deal with those older/young guys again. That was enough of a hassle the last time, thank you very much.

They never give in. To anything. Ever. They may yield a moment, concede a single battle, strategically retreat to give their enemy a false sense of victory for a surprise attack later, but they will fight to the bitter end for the war. And that was their Achilles' Heel – it would kill them one day, but they knew that. But it didn't just hold true for the battle field, it was in everything – it was why he had graduated so quickly from the Academy, why she was the best student in her year, on track to get into the most elite high school in the country on scholarship. If it wasn't a battle that got them at the end of the day, it would be the pressure, from the continual stress of never giving in, from fighting on past the moment when normal people would have given in and given up. And somehow, they couldn't care less – if they died of something as pansy-like as stress, then they couldn't call themselves warriors.

He can never tell what's on her mind. She can always tell what's on his. There's a running joke going around the known realms that if anyone was to try and play poker against the two, it's her you'd need to watch out for, because she can out read the icy young captain, and she's got no qualms relieving you of the clothes off your back. She'll never give up how she can read him when no one else can, but the truth is that she's not entirely sure herself.

They know that they'll never really know each other – after all, they're enigmas, more so to each other than everyone else. Another crazy healer girl idea, and yet another that no one can disprove. She'll never understand who he is at the fundamental level of the present him being the culmination of all of his past and present being rolled into the gigai that she sees, completely disregarding the fact that he's got a spirit that he shares his innermost thoughts and secrets with in a way that she'll never be able to compete with. He'll always be transient in her life, and it might even be years before she sees him again, and maybe they'll be completely different people by then, and what will she have hung onto all that time? What will she have missed out on? For all that they can get inside each other's head and know every little thing about the other, they don't really know each other at all. He can't comprehend her most core being, the silent, loud paradox that is her because he simply isn't her, and never will be. She's in the same boat. He's got an entire life that she's never even seen a glimpse of, and he only gets snatches of hers. They're simply points on a line that intersect repeatedly in a small space of time, and everyone suddenly can't help but know that as much as they know the two involved in this drama of theirs, they themselves will never actually know each other. Crazy healer can't help but one-up herself though, because she smiles sadly and informs them in the softest tone of voice, compassionate and tragic, that the worst bit is that they themselves know it and accept it and don't try to stop being enigmas. They just exist and she can't help but wonder how many beginnings they'll never try because they know everything already, and they're too brave to admit that they're cowards when it comes to trying because they know it'll never work.

She sometimes wonders if she's met her match. He is herself and her opposite and backwards reflection and the person whom she'd want to have directly at her back in a serious fight; she is him and his shadow and the ground rising to meet him and his wings as he lifts into flight. She'd call that a direct quote from crazy healer fairy girl, but she knows she's missing bits that make it sound more eloquent and romantic. And with crazy healer girl's penchant for saying deep things that are invariably right, she just has to wonder if he's her match like the older orange haired girl says he is.

They're closet romantics. Because the song that makes him think of her is "Punk Rock Princess" and whenever the song "Impossible" plays on her iPod, she thinks of him. They know how to ballroom dance, and to do so in the rain without slipping or falling. They only celebrate Valentine's Day and White Day with each other, and they'll never admit it, but they secretly matchmake their friends with surprisingly good results, to the point that they so called her older brother and his pint-sized partner (they made good money on that particular happening, thank you very much, though they'll deny it until their last breath.) But they have images, and being in-the-closet romantics actually works out for them, a surprise for someone else to discover about them. So far, they're the only people to know that fact about the other. They don't expect anyone else to figure it out anytime soon.

He's never had anyone's older sibling go bankai on his undead spirit ass before, so at least he can chalk this experience up as a completely new one – he seems to have a lot of those with her – but he doesn't think about it too much, because it's supposed to be an act – an act, stupid idiot, an act! – though it's far too real for his tastes, because they're officially in the Spirit Realm and the chase hasn't stopped, or the cursing behind him nor the scarily powerful attacks that he's dodging and parrying with the best of his ability. He can read the next newspaper headline now, and he really hopes that the journalists don't do a good job in investigating the event because he'd rather not have it officially get out that they're (fakely) together, because then he'll never hear the end of it and he doesn't need his lieutenant and his pseudo-sister planning his wedding, again. He's also pretty sure he can hear her laughing hysterically, and he's glad one of them is getting a kick out of this event, because he's certainly not. Especially when the article does come out and he discovers that the thrice damned journalists did their jobs correctly for once and got the whole story right (except for the part about it being fake, but they even got the bit where they won their own betting pool!) His lieutenant gauged his yell as the loudest to date, and it was heard across the Spirit Realm. She laughed some more when she was told.

Their fights weren't simple spats, they were battles of wits and lightning fast words thrown at chinks in one another's armor and when things invariably reduced to posturing for a physical battle, it would quickly escalate to something from legend, a knight battling the fierce dragon. With his draconic temper and her penchant for upholding fairness and justice and all of that stuff, it was a pretty good analogy, all things considered. What they wouldn't ever speak about, no matter how bad they fought, is the scars their fights left behind, the psychological ones – because chinks in armor mean that just about anyone who knows it's there can wound you deeply – the brand of the words whipped out like fire, the cuts layer upon cuts until it's death by a thousand cuts, the ones that make them realize that they could so easily break and destroy to rubble one another. The better question that they never ask each other is why they never do – no matter how bad the fights get, no matter how angry they get and how much they hate one another in that moment, they're always going to come back together. It's sick and twisted and messed up, but in their own way they're getting stronger, and even if it's what could be classified as abuse, they depend on it, trust only one another to do it and do it right. Maybe it says something about them, that they need someone to tear them down and reduce them to dust and rubble every once in a while. Another entry on the list of things they'll never speak about aloud.

She's brighter than the sun off fresh snow, but he'd never admit that she's the only person to ever give him snow blindness. He's not sure why she's always the bright one and he's the one who's always cool colors. He's got passionate feelings too, he just keep them on lock down when they're not helpful. Yet she's the one who's red and orange and yellow and an inferno of emotions and he's the glacier and icy and frozen stiff. She likes to remind him, at times like these, that even glaciers come in a rainbow assortment of colors, not just blue. And then she'll smile and he's got to remember sunglasses because for a moment, every time, he goes a little bit blinder to everything that isn't her. Somehow, he's okay with that.

They're like everyone else and no one else, they are uniquely them and even they don't understand how they work. He can't help but to come and visit her first, taking extra time in her world just to talk to someone so weird and normal and off-putting yet somehow easy to be around. It's a paradox, an eternity code that somehow only they can break, a shadow's shadow's shadow that burns fiercely in the infinite stretch of Time, never the same and always the same, comfortable and familiar in a way that soothes the small aches and is addicting like a drug. For him, she is his drug of choice and he is an unrepentant addict. Every moment was fleeting and limitless and neither of them are sure when exactly it got this way and even if they mind that it's this way. She's not sure if she believes in soul mates, but if she had to pick someone that she'd want to be hers, she's sure it'd be him, because there's no one else that can compare and she can't imagine herself with anyone else. And these thoughts very nearly makes them blush, but neither of them are blushers.

* * *

**A/N: And that is the end of a character study of Toshiro Hitsugaya and Karin Kurosaki. Took me a little while to write, but now I actually feel energized to pick up VE again. The songs mentioned are "Punk Rock Princess" by Something Corporate, and "Impossible" by Anberlin. I recommend listening to them. Catch you on the flip side,**

**ModernArt2012**


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